February 24, 2016
In an effort to bolster technology security efforts at Fairfield University, new policies, procedures and safeguards will be introduced over the next few months to ensure we keep our systems and data safe. In light of recent responses to phishing attacks, we will be implementing limits on individual email accounts effective today.
Individual email accounts will be limited to sending emails to 100 external recipients. Student (@student.fairfield.edu) email accounts are considered external.
Phishing scams happen regularly to businesses and academic institutions, in-fact here at Fairfield we block over 1,000,000 threat emails weekly. Recently, a phishing scam resulted in 7 employees clicking on a link and providing personal information that resulted in giving scammers access to their fairfield.edu email account. This triggered an additional 157,000 phishing emails from those email accounts on the users behalf, resulting in the fairfield.edu domain name getting blocked by all Microsoft providers (Outlook, Hotmail, Live, and more) on a temporary basis. Having our domain blocked for any period of time causes a significant barrier to conducting business and communicating with students, alumni, vendors and the daily correspondence we all have. And last night, an additional scam resulted in 35,000 emails being sent from our domain. It is important we put protocols in place to minimize the risk of this happening again and that we comply with the CAN-SPAM Act in accordance to federal law.
If you have a business need to send emails to more recipients than listed above, please contact Marketing at x3479 to use a secure, approved communication channel.
When the above limit is exceeded, you will be blocked from sending external mail for one hour. You will continue to receive incoming email. The block will be removed automatically.
Thank you for your patience as we align our security efforts with best practice.
Click here for additional information the process to send email to students for academic purposes.
Coming Soon – Tech security training sessions – online and in-person. |
